Blockchain Network IOTA To Help Taipei Become A Smart City

The city of Taipei has partnered with IOTA Foundation to help the Taiwan capital become a smart city.

Sitting at the northern tip of the island, Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City. The city proper is home to an estimated population of 2,704,810. Taipei is the political, economic, educational, and cultural center of Taiwan, and one of the major hubs of Greater China. Considered to be a global city, Taipei is part of a major high-tech industrial area.

IOTA Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation, is the creator of cryptocurrency IOTA and IOTA Tangle, an open-source distributed ledger focused on providing secure communications and payments between machines on the Internet of Things (IoT). Using directed acyclic graph (DAG) technology instead of the traditional blockchain, IOTA’s transactions are free, regardless of the size of the transaction. The system claims to handle an unlimited number of transactions simultaneously. The market capitalization of IOTA is over $6.3 billion, making it the eleventh-largest cryptocurrency in circulation.

The partnership will explore the possibilities of adapting IOTA’s DLT to meet Taipei’s needs through a number of projects, seeking to improve data integrity and authenticity concerns in public services and other domains.

The first project is the digital citizen cards with built-in TangleID. It is designed to eliminate risks of identity theft and voter fraud, while at the same time providing a simple means for tracking health history and other data for government-related services.

IOTA said they are already working on a side project for the city called Airbox. The idea is to create palm-sized air sensors that detect temperature, humidity, light, and pollution. The design is intended to give the citizens up-to-date information about pollution levels in real time. It will be installed in citizens homes, as well as in 150 Taipei City elementary schools.